Should badly behaved football fans be given a second chance? The West Ham United Supporters’ Trust thinks they should. One of our hopes now the club has established its Fan Advisory Board (FAB) is that some of these issues can be raised.
Our aim is rehabilitation of alleged ‘offenders’, often using a process where they sit and talk through the impact of their behaviour with people affected by it. It’s called restorative justice. Football’s anti-prejudice campaign group Kick It Out has a big push on this, not just about racism, which is often the focus of much of its work.
It also looks at issues such as sectarianism and it has backed work at West Ham to counter anti-gay abuse. The LGBT group for Hammers fans is called Pride Of Irons (PoI). It has done some sterling work with the club around this issue.
It started after a few ignorant fans hurled homophobic abuse at Brighton fans back in February 2020, four were arrested and pleaded guilty to offences under Section five of the Public Order Act. Two were also fined £200 plus costs and the other two £120 plus costs. Each received a three-year football banning order.
The media put the boot in to the club for not giving them indefinite bans in line with its public commitment to a zero tolerance approach. But Jim Dolan, then co-chair of PoI, took a different view. ‘Zero tolerance banning approaches are not the way forward,’ he said at the time. ‘Kicking people out of the stadiums doesn’t stop homophobia. It merely kicks it outside of the stadium turnstiles. You don’t make positive change in the world by excluding people when they make mistakes.’
PoI requested an education-based approach. The club still implements indefinite bans but they may be rescinded if the fans successfully complete education sessions led by Kick It Out and including representatives from the club and PoI, which provides the real-lived experiences of someone from the community relevant to the abuse.
Alan Bush, fan education and engagement manager at Kick It Out, said: ‘What sort of society are we if we just ban people for life? Education can absolutely work hand in hand with a football banning order, but if you just give someone a lifetime ban then there’s nowhere to come back from.
‘Yes, certain behaviours are so horrific that we may not want that person inside a football stadium. I’m not going to recommend that every fan who goes through fan education goes back to football. But that has to be the aim. Our objective is to rehabilitate offenders using restorative practices and hopefully reintegrate them back into football. If we do that, we’re going a long way toward achieving our goals.’
WHUST wants this important work extended to as many offences as possible – because across the board football fans get treated more harshly than anyone else. Possession of a class A drug, for example, was upgraded in 2022 but only at football grounds. It’s no longer the crime that gets the punishment but where the offence took place.
The Sentencing Council, which tells judges how hard to punish offenders, has separate advice for offences at football grounds. This means that a conviction for exactly the same offence at Royal Ascot, Lords cricket ground or Twickenham rugby stadium would result in a lighter sentence than at any football match. It’s victimisation of, and discrimination against, football fans.
Football banning orders normally automatically follow convictions for offences as minor as possession of alcohol while trying to enter the ground; sending a letter, electronic communication or article with intent to cause distress or anxiety, or even selling on your season ticket when you can’t use it – which, if you didn’t know, is illegal under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
All football matches are ‘designated events’ under the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc) Act 1985 but this is only the case for certain named events in other sports. This even makes carrying alcohol in vehicles on the way to a match illegal, let alone getting drunk. These are policed harder at football grounds than at horse racing, rugby or cricket venues.
The facts are that there are more arrests per head at Royal Ascot than even the Notting Hill Carnival and way more than at football, where there are only five arrests per 100,000 spectators. Yet football supporters get picked on. There are additional specific ‘crimes’ for the beautiful game, with its own law, the Football (Offences) Act 1991.
This makes ‘indecent chanting at a football match’ an offence, for example. Anyone singing ‘Bowen’s on fire’ could fall foul of overzealous policing of that. The hardline crackdown disproportionately affects the young and inexperienced. The government says that of the 1,624 football banning orders in force on 1 August 2023, ‘around 70% (1,133) were issued to those aged between 18 and 34 and 2% (39) were issued to those aged 17 and under’.
Who can hold up their hand and say they never made a mistake in their youth that they regret, said something then that they would not say now or behaved in a way they later considered inappropriate? We grow up. We learn. WHUST believes everyone should be treated equally in law, with no lower burdens of proof or tougher sentences for football fans. We also believe in giving people a second chance.
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